Thumb, Lowering the bar, Thanksgiving Timing
I have an appointment today to go to our employee med clinic to have my thumb looked at. It will be interesting to see what sort of diagnosis I come out of there with.
The headlines have been filled with stories about all of these retailers crossing over to the formerly taboo practice of being open on Thanksgiving. This practice was initiated by K-Mart somewhere around 15 years ago. I distinctly remembering my grandmother, who used to be a manager there, being disgusted when they started doing it.
It seems like a lemming mentality has strongly taken hold. Places that really have no real point to be open early are open early. Hell the lady at Dunkin Donuts told me they are opening at 1AM so early morning shoppers have coffee available. It really is pretty stupid.
I like how the ads I see from retailers say they are open on THURSDAY, deliberately omitting THANKSGIVING from the text, somehow making it sound less offensive.
You can bet that this practice will only expand in the future. Once the door to such practices is opened, it is blown off the hinges and will never be closed again.
Tomorrow we will be involved in the huge Thanksgiving 4 mile race in a big way. Most years we have either run, helped with the pre-race registration or both. We have never chip timed this event because of the huge amount of people that participate, last year that number was somewhere around 2300.
Well this year the race director and I agreed we would try to chip time the race but not the entire race field. Instead when people registered they had an option to sign up for either a competitive chip timed race or an untimed (clock at the finish line) fun run. The chip event will start 10 minutes before the fun run.
We have almost 1000 people that opted to pay an extra $5 to be chip timed. 1000 is still a big number. In order to expedite body movement the race director bought custom timing chips for the race. This accomplishes two things.
The timing chip can be given to the runner ahead of time if they do an early packet pick up. If they do an early pickup they can totally avoid standing in ANY lines on the day of the race which is ideal. They also are able to exit the finish chute without waiting for someone to remove the chip from their sneaker. The timing chip also becomes their little tidy souvenir from the race.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out in the real world race conditions.
After the race we are picking up mom for our small Thanksgiving celebration. Tofurkey once again will be center stage on the menu. It really tastes quite good believe it or not. At this point I really don’t mind at all a meat free feast.
In the past Mom sometimes would stay over a night around Thanksgiving but she has no interest in doing that this year because she has to work at 10am on Friday.
I want to bring mom’s Thanksgiving newspaper with to our place so I can scan the ads. If there are any deals that I find sufficiently interesting Ali and I may venture out together early Friday to scope out some deals, in the SSR.
I have plenty of potential to do’s for the long 4 day weekend. In addition to maybe hanging some Christmas lights, I would love to get the bi-annual pressure washing done for the holidays. The pool cage and sheds are an non-festive shade of green right now. However right now, wrapping my right thumb around a pressure washer trigger is impossible. I would either need to awkwardly use my left hand for the process or use the trigger lock out which keeps the flow going continuously. Maybe I will ask Ali if she would like to get broken into the wonderful, wet world of pressure washing.
The weather this weekend is supposed to be FANTASTIC. Cool nights and mild daytime temps with low humidity make me smile.